Pre-purchase building inspection

The one most people need. A visual inspection of the readily accessible areas of the property, reported against AS 4349.1, before your finance or inspection clause runs out.

When you need it: You have an offer accepted and a clock running.

What it costs

$440 flat feeinc. GST ($400 + GST)

# Pre-purchase building inspection

Specimen rewrite. 1,480 words against the current page's 404. Written to pass qa_voice.py.

You have an offer accepted and a clause with a date on it. Everything below is written on the assumption that the date is close.

A pre-purchase inspection is a visual examination of the parts of a house a person can safely get to, written up against AS 4349.1. That standard is worth understanding before you read anything else, because it defines the job far more narrowly than most buyers assume, and almost every dispute we see afterwards comes from that gap.

What "readily accessible" actually excludes

The standard limits the inspection to areas that can be reached safely without moving anything heavy, cutting anything open, or dismantling any part of the building. In a Perth house that rules out more than you would think.

Nobody lifts roof tiles. Nobody cuts an inspection hatch. Nobody moves the owner's furniture, and in an occupied house that alone can put a third of the wall surfaces out of reach. If a wardrobe is built over the only ceiling access, the roof void is not inspected, and the report says so.

Roof space access is the one that decides most reports. Where there is a manhole and safe footing, we go in. Where the manhole is 400 millimetres square, or the ceiling is a sheeted rake with no cavity, or the trusses sit too tight to crawl, we record it as not inspected and we say why. An inspector who reports on a roof void they never entered is guessing, and the guess is always optimistic.

Subfloors are rarer here than the standard assumes. Most Perth stock since the sixties is slab on ground, so there is nothing underneath to look at. Where there is a suspended timber floor, usually in the older inner suburbs, the subfloor is often the most informative part of the whole visit.

What we are actually looking at, in this city

Building inspection advice written for Sydney or Melbourne is close to useless in Perth. The stock is different, the ground is different, and the failure modes are different.

Double brick. Most of the metropolitan area is double brick and tile, which behaves nothing like the framed construction that dominates the eastern states. Cracking patterns mean different things. Articulation joints matter, and plenty of older houses do not have them where the current standard would want them.

The ground. Perth sits on a sequence of sand and limestone that changes as you move east. Bassendean sands drain hard and move little. Get onto the Guildford formation clays and reactive movement becomes the thing you are watching for, particularly around old trees and leaking stormwater. Footing behaviour is a soil question before it is a building question.

Salt and limestone. Rising damp in limestone footings, salt attack on mortar, and corrosion of wall ties are all live issues near the coast. The tie corrosion one is quiet and expensive.

Roof timbers. Terracotta and concrete tile roofs on timber battens, and in a broad coastal band those battens are breaking down chemically. It is not rot and it is not termites. It has its own section on this site because it decides who pays for the roof.

Asbestos. Anything built or renovated before about 1990 can contain it. Eaves sheeting, wet-area linings, fences, old shed roofs. We are not licensed assessors and we do not sample, but we record what warrants a licensed assessment and we do not soften it.

Two things WA law requires at sale

These catch people out constantly, and neither is expensive to fix if you know before settlement.

Since 2009, a home in Western Australia must have at least two residual current devices covering all power and lighting circuits before it is sold. Mains-powered smoke alarms are required on the same trigger. Battery units mounted in a 1978 house will not satisfy it. We check both and we tell you which way they fall, because it is the seller's obligation and it is much easier raised before settlement than after.

What the report gives you

Every defect gets a photograph, a location, and a plain description of what it means. The photograph is the part that matters when you are negotiating, because a written description of cracking is arguable and a picture of it is not.

Findings are separated into what is significant, what is minor, and what is maintenance. That separation is deliberate. A report that lists forty items at equal weight is useless to a buyer under time pressure, and we have read plenty of them.

Where something cannot be reached, the report says so and says why. Where something needs a trade we are not, the report says which trade. We are a registered building contractor, not a licensed electrician, plumber, or asbestos assessor, and pretending otherwise would not help you.

Timing

The report is with you within 24 hours of the inspection itself. Not 24 hours from booking. That distinction is the whole point when you are inside a contract window, because the leverage disappears the moment you are committed.

The standard REIWA contract gives a defined window for a building inspection, and the number of business days is written into the annexure rather than fixed by law. Read the date on your own contract. If it is tight, tell us when you call and we will work to it.

What it costs

A flat fee of $400 for the building inspection, the same whatever the size of the home. Adding the timber pest inspection makes it $560 all up. Send us the address and we will book it in.

Whether to add the timber pest inspection is a separate question with a separate standard behind it, AS 4349.3, and it is covered on its own page. Perth sits in one of the higher termite-pressure regions in the country, which is the short answer.

Who is standing behind it

There is no qualification required to call yourself a building inspector in Western Australia. No registration, no licence, no minimum experience. The title is unregulated and most buyers have no idea.

This business is a registered building contractor, BC105819, and you can check that number yourself on the Building and Energy register. That is the point of putting it on the page.

What the standard actually requires

The standard requires an inspection agreement between client and inspector before the inspection happens, setting out purpose, scope and the criteria the building will be judged against (clause 2.1). An inspector who turns up without one has skipped a step the standard treats as mandatory.

Three things are reported: major defects, a general impression of how extensive the minor defects are, and any major defect that amounts to an urgent and serious safety hazard (clause 2.3.5). The standard does not ask for a line-by-line list of every minor blemish, and a report that gives you one has buried the important findings in the unimportant ones.

A major defect is defined as one serious enough that it has to be put right to avoid unsafe conditions, loss of utility, or further deterioration of the property (clause 1.4.10). That definition is doing a lot of work in a negotiation, which is why it is worth reading twice.

The house is judged against a building of similar age and type, built to the practice generally accepted at the time it went up, and maintained since without significant loss of strength or serviceability (clause 2.3.6). It is not judged against today's codes. A 1968 house is not defective for being built like a 1968 house.

A report under this standard is not a certificate of compliance with any Act, regulation, local law or by-law, and it is not a warranty against future problems. It also does not set out to identify unauthorised building work or work that fails current building regulations (clause 1.2).

Access, and what it decides

Six areas where they exist: the interior, the roof space, the exterior, the subfloor, the roof exterior, and the property within 30 metres of the building inside the site boundaries (clause 3.2.1).

That 30-metre sweep is not decorative. It picks up car accommodation, a detached laundry or shed, retaining walls over 700 mm high, paths, driveways, steps, fencing, earth embankments, and surface water and stormwater run-off (clause 3.2.1).

Reasonable access to a roof space means an access hole of about 400 by 500 mm and a crawl space of about 600 by 600 mm (Table 3.2). Below those dimensions the space is not reasonably accessible, and the report has to say so.

Reasonable access does not extend to cutting an access hole, or removing screws, bolts, fixings or sealant to get a cover off (Table 3.2, Note 1). Nothing is dismantled.

Elevated areas are inspected where safe access exists, or where there is a clear line of sight from a 3.6 metre ladder used safely (clause 3.2.2). That ladder length is the standard's own yardstick for what one person can reasonably do alone.

What the standard leaves out

Appendix D of AS 4349.1 lists what an inspection does not have to cover. These are the ones people are most often surprised by.

• Timber pest activity. Which is why a timber pest inspection is a separate job under AS 4349.3, with its own scope and its own report.
• Concealed tie-downs and bracing. Visible connections in an accessible roof space are looked at. Anything built in behind linings is not.
• Footings below ground, and soil conditions. Footing behaviour has to be inferred from what it does to the walls above, because the footings themselves cannot be seen.
• Electrical installations, and the operation of smoke detectors. Reported as a compliance matter where relevant, but testing them is an electrician's work, not an inspector's.
• Concealed plumbing. A leak is found by its effect, not by opening a wall.
• Health hazards including asbestos. Where material warrants a licensed assessment we say so plainly. We do not sample and we are not licensed assessors.
• Air conditioning, gas fittings, alarm and intercom systems, garage door mechanisms, swimming pool filtration. All excluded by name.
• Framing sizes and their adequacy, and control joints. An engineering assessment, not a visual one.
• Insulation, stored items, furniture and floor coverings. They also block access, which is the more practical problem on the day.

How cracking is categorised

Width alone does not decide whether a crack is a structural defect. The standard says so directly: a crack of 0.1 mm can be a structural defect while one of 5.0 mm may not be, and cracking in a structural element does not by itself mean there is a structural defect (Appendix E, clause E2.4). Anyone quoting you a millimetre threshold as the answer has not read it.

Delignification is named in the standard

AS 4349.1 names delignification itself. Appendix F lists, as an example of a material deterioration defect, delignification severe enough that the strength of the member has been reduced. The same table lists missing tie-downs and structural connections, and missing ant caps, as installation defects.

The standard requires the inspector to record who inspected, for whom, the address, the date, the weather on the day, what limited the inspection, and the defects observed (clause 3.4), and recommends those records be kept for at least three years. Weather is on that list for a reason: a shower recess that is dry on the day is not proof of a shower recess that does not leak.